COLLECTIBLES
“Florida was a fantasy for me as a kid growing up in Illinois
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in those gray winters,” says retired Florida State University
professor, historian and author Gary Mormino, who
wrote about Florida in Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams.
“An image of an orange tree would have been mind-blowing
for a working-class family who’d never eaten an orange,
nevermind seen rows of those trees under a bright blue sky,”
he explains. “Postcards are such an effective medium, they’re
cheap and omnipresent. Today we’re bombarded with so
many visual images that I’m not sure a young person could
comprehend what a big deal it was to get a postcard 100
years ago.”
RECRUITMENT TOOLS
Mormino points out that postcards were among the recruitment
tools that St. Petersburg and other cities used to draw in
tourists and year-round residents alike, playing on exotic themes
of bathing beauties and glorious sunsets framed by palms.
Oftentimes Florida cities gave professional photos free to
postcard companies for reproduction — and reaped the public
relations benefit of people associating those snapshots with the
promise of sun and fun with a Florida vacation or residence.
He speculates that chain migration — the Florida phenomena
in which communities encompass folks who are from the
same town or geographic area in another state — was likely
influenced by picture postcards sent by the first to move South.
Postcard images of Florida might be part of the reason David
Canfield moved to Cocoa from Rochester, N,Y., six years ago.
“When I moved down here there were lots of things I
wanted to see from the postcard pictures,” he says.
The former postal employee has collected picture postcards
ALISON O’LEARY
Longtime Port St. Lucie resident John Carvelli marvels at the population
growth and other changes shown by his vintage postcard collection.
since 1968 and joined the Cocoa-based Space Coast Postcard
Club to stay in touch with other collectors. Now he’s closer to
the postcard shows that crop up during the winter, scouting
for items he can add to his collections of Rochester and
Brevard County images.
Postcard clubs, he says, are dying out with their aging
members, but “once in a while a younger person comes in
and gets hooked.”
POSTCARD SHOWS
Despite the decline in postcards sent by mail and the changing
demographics of postcard clubs, Mary Martin isn’t ready
to give up on them. She’s a second-generation businesswom-
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Judging from the vintage automobiles parked outside, this image of the Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce was made not long after its debut in 1923. The handtinted
style of the postcard also reflects the same era, which often depicted a community’s important structures and scenes.